Narratives regarding the built environment of the post–World War II United States often emphasize the effects of clearance and the repercussions of urban, or suburban, “renewal.” In Bulldozer: Demolition and Clearance of the Postwar Landscape, Francesca Russello Ammon directs our attention to the act of clearance itself, both in the United States and abroad, focusing on the companies that benefited from demolition, the writers and artists who depicted changes on the land, and the machines that carried out the process.

Ammon's protagonist in this story is the bulldozer: a powerful, relentless piece of motorized metal whose blades carved into untrammeled nature and plowed into existing urban landscapes, providing a sense of “progress” in the American imagination while exacting a staggering toll on the environment—and the mind. Friendly, smiling bulldozers may have graced the pages of several popular postwar children's books, but Ammon reminds us that the reality of demolition and clearance was not exactly the stuff of quiet bedtime reading. A wartime image of a menacing army of crawler tractors outfitted with bulldozer blades awaiting shipment to the Pacific battlefront greets the reader on Ammon's dust jacket and in the first chapter. A chilling photograph of young Presbyterian minister Bruce Klunder lying motionless after being crushed by a bulldozer during a 1964 protest against school segregation in Cleveland, Ohio, marks the book's concluding section. With some exceptions, the machines of modern renewal appear here as destructive, divisive, discriminatory, and demonic.

They did not always seem so. Ammon tells a story that also underscores the pride Americans felt regarding the nation's engineering know-how and its ability to produce machines that could maneuver deftly through crumbling cities and across inhospitable landscapes, just as they did abroad during the war. She demonstrates …